The Italian Film Club at UCL will resume its meetings tomorrow with a screening of Bello, Onesto, Emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata. The film is a 1971 comedy directed by Luigi Zampa starring Alberto Sordi and Claudia Cardinale.

As Italy descended into poverty and social unrest in the aftermath of World War II, the promise of good-paying jobs lured many thousands of young men to faraway Australia. In 1971, after living about twenty-five years Down Under, one of those emigrants, middle-aged Amedeo, a lineman in the remote New South Wales settlement bearing the fictional name of Bun Bun Ga, several kilometers from the outback city of Broken Hill, is about to meet Carmela, his prospective bride from Rome, with whom he has been corresponding. Each of them, however, misrepresented facts to the other — Carmela, a very attractive woman in her early thirties, is a semiliterate prostitute seeking an opportunity to get away from her brutal pimp, with the letters ghostwritten by her friend Rosalba, while Amedeo, feeling inadequate about his ordinary appearance, sent Carmela a photograph, taken about twenty years earlier, of himself between Bampo and Giuseppe, two Italian immigrant friends. The arrow in the photo, however, is over Giuseppe because, when Amedeo visited the tall, handsome, muscular Giuseppe for advice, Giuseppe erased the arrow over Amedeo’s head and penciled it over his own head…

Please note that the film will be in Italian with Italian subtitles only.